A History of Machine Learning by Political Machines

After that election, Laura Quinn moved mountains to raise the funds, assemble the team, and lead the overhaul of the Democratic Party's web, data, and analytics infrastructure. The Republicans were able to conduct national targeting in 2000 because they had built a consolidated voter file covering all 50 states. As a key part of the overhaul, and with just a few years of effort, Lina Brunton miraculously consolidated the Democratic Party's voter files, which had previously been controlled individually by the state parties. Between 2003 and 2008, the Democratic Party developed significant infrastructure on top of this standardized data substrate.